Among the believers

Half-crouched in the sand on a beach in Konark, Odisha, Mumu shifts his weight from leg to leg, telling me how he learned to balance on the waves during trips on his father’s fishing boat. His toes in the sand are strong and splayed. Surfers call them “fishermen’s toes”, he tells me, ideal for gripping a board, “and we are fishermen only.” As children, Mumu and his friends would pass the time paddling out to sea on wooden planks, letting the waves propel them back in to the beach. Mumu knew how to surf long before he had set eyes on a surfboard.

On the same beach, I meet Murthy from Kovalam – this one not in Kerala but near Chennai – who tells me he used to bodyboard using a wooden window-frame from his house. Velu, from a village near Pondicherry, tells me he once found an abandoned surfboard in a guesthouse he was working at and, soon after, he’d sold his one gold ring to chase waves through India, the Andamans and Sri Lanka. Now, these children of fishermen are all surfing teachers.

For me, growing up in the Eighties and watching TV in landlocked Bangalore, surfing was represented by a singular image: a white man emerging in slo-mo from the monster-barrel of a wave, set to the hysterical chorus of “O Fortuna”. Old Spice. The Mark of a Man. You know, that sort of thing. For whatever reason, the image stuck, and surfing always seemed to me essentially a foreign activity. So when I heard people were surfing in India, I had to go down to the water to see for myself.

“We just wanted to see boards here on the beach,” says Spandan Banerjee, a surfer from Mumbai who, along with an organization called the Surfing Yogis, started the India Surf Festival (ISF) in 2012, without really knowing they’d done so. They’d invited friends – surfers, musicians, artists – to gather for a celebration, nothing more than that. But word spread quickly and Spandan remembers a journalist calling him from Bhubaneswar, asking just what was going on out here and why everyone was talking about it.

Now in its third year, the ISF is run out of Lotus Eco Village resort, seven kilometres from Konark. The adjacent public beach is a particularly happy spot for watersports, where an arm of the Kushbhadra River approaches the Bay of Bengal. The kilometre-long U of beach is dotted with camping tents and billowing, surfboard-shaped sponsor banners stuck in the sand – Kingfisher Blue, Woodlands, Vanhunks. The breeze is fragrant with blunts. The music is eclectic to a fault, with everything from The Beatles to techno renditions of the Gayatri mantra. The festivalgoers comprise surfers, musicians, artists armed with blacklight paint, confused tourists otherwise passing through, young Indians looking for a homegrown sort of Lollapalooza or Burning Man and neo-hippies trying to save the world by, well, I’m not sure. I’m not sure they are either.

“The festival was supposed to be like a family gathering,” Spandan tells me, a little bewildered (or baked). “How did it turn into an event?”

On the first afternoon of the three-day festival, I walk through the ISF’s giant dreamcatcher of an entrance and gauchely ask for a schedule. “There is no schedule,” says Sebastian, a lean, hyper-energetic Argentinian man of around forty who has just greeted me with a “Namaste”. From what I can tell, he’s one of the festival’s most assiduous volunteers, in charge of the stage, sound system and music, all sheltered under a dome of tessellated fabric triangles sewn by his mother. The pattern is reminiscent of the shells of the Olive Ridley turtles that nest along the Odisha coast. This year’s acts include two rock bands from Guwahati, a man who looks like present-day Robert Plant who plays the sitar accompanied by frantic loops from his MacBook and a duo from Bangalore armed with a harmonica and improvised percussion instruments.

“This is a handcrafted festival,” says Sebastian, who I will later spot juggling on stage one evening, and on another occasion making a cigarette vanish into his eye before pulling it out of his nose to entertain a biker gang that has dropped in from Bhubaneswar. “In Europe, everything is plastic,” he goes on, “but here it is human. We are like a family.” Before I can learn more, a bearded man urgently taps Sebastian on the shoulder, wanting to know where the rolling papers are. They run off together, and a few minutes later Sebastian is on the water, on a paddleboard, propelling himself with a bladed pole and wearing a full-body crocodile costume.

Stand-up paddling, or SUP, is an adjunct to surfing that’s become increasingly popular around the world in the last few years. To my surprise, SUP is the only board sport that can actually be learned at the ISF. (Dressing up like a character from a children’s show is optional.) The Walk on Water workshop runs for all three days, and the India SUP Cup race on the last day is the only competitive part of this distinctly laid-back festival. Despite this organizational emphasis on SUP, most proper surfers here – Mumu & Co, for example – are about as enthusiastic about SUP as sprinters would be about a languid jog around the park.

Talk to the Surfing Yogis’ Sanjay Samantray – local facilitator of the festival/coordinator with the state tourism board and local police – and there’s no getting away from the fact that SUP is key to understanding the ISF. A lean, middle-aged man with a rumbling voice, Sanjay is sitting across a tree-shaded bench in a corner of the main festival area, from where he can keep an eye on things as he talks to me. “Imagine your body. 80 per cent water. Find your balance. Now walk on water,” he says with a bit of a messianic flourish.

Popularizing SUP in India is something of a mission with Sanjay, and he does seem to believe in the sport’s implications beyond board sales.

For 21 years, Sanjay employed what he calls “the Vedantic approach of management” to run an electronics company in Bhubaneswar. Whatever that means, the job still “wasn’t giving me peace,” he says. So in 1999, he founded the Rangers Adventure Foundation, to use adventure sports to raise awareness about the Self and its relationship to the environment. (The ashram – as Sanjay calls the Rangers premises – is in the woods, a few kilometres away from the ISF.) Soon after, he met a Hawaiian surfer looking for waves along the Odisha coast, then an Australian doing the same, and they formed the Surfing Yogis. It was a loose collective that would use Rangers as a base to search out the best breaks in the region. When Sanjay imported his first surfboard he recalls it taking “20 letters to Customs” to let the strange foreign object through.

“Surfing Yogis is the idea of surrendering, collaborating and playing with the water,” explains Sanjay. He finds international surfing culture too aggressive and wants to facilitate what he calls the Indianization of surfing. “We need something more sublime,” he says – something other than the white dude barrelling out of a half-pipe selling aftershave, for example – and to Sanjay, this is SUP. He explains that the USP of SUP is that it can be practised on rivers, tanks, canals and lakes, and is therefore more widely accessible in India than the surfing in, say, Hawaii. The end goal to all this, if there is one, is the health of Indian water bodies and their dependent ecosystems. The “glamour” of the festival, he says, works towards this noble end.

Not far from the music stage lies the Art Zone, where at night you’ll find Rahul painting wavy configurations that jump off the canvas under UV light. There’s Harsh, who spends the day raking patterns in the sand that depict the enchantress Mohini and the churning of the ocean of milk, spread so wide across the sand the image can only be fully appreciated by a camera attached to a hovering quadricopter drone. Near the breakfast buffet, I find Mata, a Belgian-Australian woman who’s been travelling in India and Nepal aiming to revive her relationship with art. She’s eating upma with her fingers amid Indians eating it with spoons, her hair held in a bun by a neem twig she’s just used to brush her teeth. Prints of her drawings are on display in the Art Zone – the two most notable to my eyes being one of an auto-rickshaw with a surfboard on top, and one with a cycle-rickshaw hauling the chassis of a Maruti Gypsy, the text reading “Everything is Possible”.

The international crowd here is well-versed in this sort of post-Beatles aesthetic of Indian spirituality. Even Sanjay startles me once, saying something about his being “from the ancient land of Sheeeeva” which made “impossible look like ‘I’m possible’”, making him sound like a motivational guru out for some sweet California lucre. There’s a good deal of talk from the more sensitive foreigners, about vibrations or the energy of this or that place, that might prompt the more sceptical-minded to ask what they’ve been smoking, to which the answer is quite plainly blowin’ in the wind.

Down the beach, past the Walk on Water workshop and around a hundred metres in from the water’s edge, sits a multicoloured school bus with Goa licence plates. On the hood is the round, smiling visage of Jagannath; on the left side are Tibetan Buddhist motifs; the rear of the bus has Shiva presiding over a fender that reads “Love ’n’ Light”. Inside, behind Aztec-themed curtains, the bus has been converted into a living space, with a kitchen counter, a bed, a bench.

“This is the mothership,” says JC, who looks a lot like accepted depictions of the Nazarene who shared those initials. He’s one of the original founders of the Surfing Yogis – the roving Australian who teamed up with Sanjay – and he says “there’s a special energy here in Jagannath Puri that keeps drawing me back.” He’s driven here from Goa with seven members of the Five Elements Collective, a loose agglomeration of like-minded questers that aim to “explore and harness the elements”. The bus runs on a 50-50 mixture of diesel and vegetable oil – “new flower power”, according to JC – and is a “platform for creative souls”. Surfing and adventure sports are just tools to spread the message about the environment, he says, therefore collecting used vegetable oil to run the bus is “the most respectful thing you can do – turning waste to energy. It’s symbolic.”

I tell JC the hand-painted bus reminds me of stories I’ve heard from retired European hippies in Manali, who’d travel overland to India, oftentimes via the sacred Pudding Shop in Istanbul. He smiles and nods. “The hippies were onto something but they didn’t finish it. Capitalism came and…” he smacks one hand down on another. But now, he feels a new consciousness is growing. “All those people out there trying to save the world? You’re not alone. We can all rise together.”

Far less hippidy dippity, far more pragmatic are the young Indians who’re here in pursuit of pleasure and have flown down rather than bother with a bus. They’re the ones in their twenties or thirties, affluent, who’ve heard about the ISF from friends, read about it in the papers or seen the event page on Facebook. A good indicator of Sanjay’s success is that several of them tell me they’d now rather come to Odisha than Goa to party on the beach. I ask a woman from Delhi in a leopard-print strappy top how she’s enjoying herself. She says, “Day theek tha, night awesome tha.” One guy says, as if emerging from a film: “Hit hai.”

Several of the twenty-something Indian men work in IT. One guy’s shirt reads “Stay Calm and Keep Coding”. Another techie from Delhi sporting a “Good guy goes to heaven/Bad guy goes to Pattaya” slogan on the back of his shirt tells me, somewhat unconvincingly, that he’s here because he’s always been fascinated by watersports. Rubbish. The main draw for Pattaya and those like him isn’t surfing, it’s the chicks wandering around, many clad in swimwear with varying degrees of modesty.

It’s lunchtime and I’m standing around the buffet table with Pattaya, another IT guy from Delhi and two young men from Cuttack, one in the furnishings business and another who imports deodorants. “Where did that Israeli girl go?” one of them wants to know, doing a quick scan of the people eating. “Kasauli,” guesses Pattaya. Because, he tells us, that’s the hub for the drug trade in India, and all Israeli tourists in India are really drug mules ya know. Pattaya’s eyes light up and he turns to Deodorant Importer. What he should really find a way to import, Pattaya tells him, are sex toys, because they’re always being confiscated by Customs. He launches into the story of a friend of his who tried to bring a folding inflatable sex doll into the country, but the Customs official had peered at his X-ray scanner and wanted to know what a head of hair was doing in the suitcase. “It’s my wig,” he’d haplessly replied, but the doll was discovered and seized. “It’s always the hair,” says Pattaya.

Since it’s clear that surfing is the least of the reasons the lads are here, I ask if any of them managed to get lucky. “We’ve spent three days in a fantasy world,” says Pattaya, but no, nothing. Deodorant remains silent. Pattaya explains that everyone’s too busy rushing about for a quick tumble in the underbrush: “It takes 2-3 days for a crush to be developed, but they all go away. Look at that Israeli – she went away.”

There’s one twenty-something Indian woman who’s been here all three days, but Pattaya and friends still wouldn’t stand a chance, because also present is her father: a man in his fifties wearing a floppy, multicoloured woman’s summer hat, standing stiffly on the bank where the Walk on Water workshop is in progress. He gazes out over the water more keenly than the lifeguards. I get talking to him and learn that he works at a public sector unit four hours’ drive away, and he’s here solely to chaperone his daughter. She’s hanging about on the shore, and when I ask if she’s been in the water today, he answers for her and says it’s too windy. He’s so uptight he won’t even sit on the sand, and I can’t help thinking that the evenings here must possess a harrowing dum-maaro-dum quality for him. What does he think of the culture here, I ask. He bobs his head slowly and capaciously as if to signal that he knows what I’m asking about but couldn’t deign to answer, then comes up with a stunningly oblique reply: “Government should promote watersports.”

Ok then.

On the last day of the festival, saris appear amid the bikinis, splotches of betel juice appear on the sand in front of clusters of gawping local men. In the afternoon, I see an old woman in a sari go catatonic with shock upon seeing a young girl from Calcutta walk by in tiny shorts, cigarette in hand. One of the girls who’s planning to defect here from Goa makes it a point to pick up cigarette butts from the sand and throw them in dustbins, though I wonder if it matters when I see the dump of black plastic bags and Kingfisher Blue bottles in the woods just off the festival venue. I hope it’s a temporary dump. Otherwise, how is the ISF going to be anything but Just Another Seaside Attraction fallen into disrepair and out of favour in the near future? What particularly disturbs me are the various bumps I see along the shore: washed-up carcasses of the endangered Olive Ridley turtles. Conservationists blame mechanized fishing in the winter nesting period, and maybe Sanjay’s idea of SUP bringing Indians closer to water will help them somehow. Maybe Sanjay’s proposal to Odisha Tourism to introduce SUP on Chilika Lake instead of motorboats will save some of the 150 or so Irrawaddy dolphins, a few of which drown in fishing nets or are hacked by longtail propellers of tourist boats every year.

That the ISF venue is studded with dreamcatchers is a metaphor as accurate as it is cliché – these are webs meant to snare bad dreams and let only the good ones through. The thing is, everyone here is still figuring out what their dreams are, as well as how their ideals are going to keep Gaia safe. Like everything else, the ISF is going to have to grow, evolve and learn.

SUP bootcamp, party zone, talent show, surfer hangout, an eco-awareness course on the sly: it’s all quite dizzying. Now that I’m back on the Deccan plateau, I find there’s one image that has stuck, thanks to a surfing demo on the last day, the one time over the three days that surfers like Mumu and Murthy and Velu, those spry fisherfolk, managed to cut a decent break. Now when I think of surfing, I don’t see Old Spice. I see something new. I see something far more exciting.